random walk through fields of musings

Thursday, March 4, 2010

(mostly) machine readable event info

Being a geek means I cringe when easily parseable data isn't. The AADL is a fine public library and offers pretty cool online tools, but they only give us a RSS feed of checkouts with the due dates in the "summary" stanza. Although they send us an email reminder 2 days before the item is due, that doesn't fit into my iCal feed grokking calendar. There are a few other such RSS feeds that hide the event data within and being sure that I'm not the only one facing this problem I looked around for a generic solution and finally hit upon a few others using Yahoo Pipes!. It took far too long to get it just right (and even then timezone parsing is still off) but I made my first publically somewhat useful pipe, described as part of a thread on the AADL forums. If you want to see the source for the pipe or use it, read the forum post and then click on http://pipes.yahoo.com/rpaditya/aadlduedates.